According to her LinkedIn, Miriam Kates is a one-time science teacher who now works as finance director at a software company. She has sat on Bradfield Parish Council since 2015 and unsuccessfully stood in this year’s elections to Sheffield City Council.

A local candidate, who attended both school and university in Sheffield, she is married with three children.

Here’s Mark Wallace’s potted summary of the constituency from last month:

“In various incarnations and on various boundaries, this seat has returned Labour MPs at every election since 1931. However, UKIP’s collapse last year saw an extraordinary increase in the Tory vote share of 15.5 percentage points, reducing Angela Smith’s majority to 1,322 (2.6 per cent).”

One pattern we have spotted in our analyses of the classes of 2015 and 2017 is that Conservative gains (or retentions in marginals) are very often delivered by candidates with strong local roots. With the Labour majority clashed to such a slender margin and potentially over three years to campaign, Cates may have a strong chance to break the Opposition’s grip on this seat.